Category Archives: History

Why Bakhmut Is Falling, by Moon of Alabama

Posted on March 8, 2023 | Leave a comment

The Russians have more of everything and Bakhmut will soon fall. From Moon of Alabama at moonofalabama.org:

Just two days ago I reported that Bakhmut is falling. The Ukrainian soldiers there are outgunned 1 to 10 and die under artillery fire with little chance to shot back. More reports from the front have since come in. They support my dire view.

The German pro-Ukrainian news outlet Bild reported this morning that there were misgivings in the Ukrainian war leadership:

President Volodymyr Zelensky and Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces Valerii Zaluzhnyi have conflicting views on how the military should handle the situation in Bakhmut, according to unnamed sources within the Ukrainian political leadership cited in a report by Bild. 

Bild writes that Zaluzhnyi was deliberating a tactical withdrawal from Bakhmut weeks ago over concern for the wellbeing of his troops.

The Ukrainian government told Bild that remaining in Bakhmut was the right decision due to the serious damage it inflicted on Russian military personnel and equipment. However, according to other sources cited by the publication, the situation is at risk of becoming untenable.

“The vast majority of soldiers in Bakhmut do not understand why the city is being held,” a Ukrainian military analyst told Bild on condition of anonymity.

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Posted in Collapse, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, Politics, War

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the greatest lie told during covid, by el gato malo

Posted on March 8, 2023 | Leave a comment

What kind of threat do pandemics pose to modern societies? From el gato malo at boriquagato.substack.com:

scott atlas has made a list of the 10 biggest lies told by the misinformation ministries during covid.

you can read it HERE.

it’s a good list.

it covers spread, risk, mitigation, far fetched pharma fables, and all the other fabulism with which we have all become so unavoidably familiar.

and indeed, these were all lies told by people who either knew better or should have known better. every actual expert was sidelined and the social contagion of panic took center stage as the drama kids playing at being the science kids took the world on the greatest pseudoscientific joyride in human history. “story” overtook “science” and “epigram” shouted down “epidemiology.” 100 years of evidence based pandemic response programs were defenestrated and replaced with superstition driven diktat that “looked like doing something.”

and it has, predictably, fallen apart and is coming to be seen as the failure of nerve, failure of science, and failure of the asch conformity test that it was.

but that does not mean that it’s over.

what if embedded in all of this is perhaps one more lie?

the greatest lie.

the one lie to rule them all.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, History, Medicine, Science, Tyranny

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My Fifty Years With Daniel Ellsberg, by Seymour Hersh

Posted on March 8, 2023 | Leave a comment

A tribute to a man who was willing to go to jail to stop the Vietnam War, from Seymour Hersh at seymourhersh.substack.com:

The man who changed America

Daniel Ellsberg at a press conference in New York City, 1972.

I think it best that I begin with the end. On March 1, I and dozens of Dan’s friends and fellow activists received a two-page notice that he had been diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer and was refusing chemotherapy because the prognosis, even with chemo, was dire. He will be ninety-two in April.

Last November, over a Thanksgiving holiday spent with family in Berkeley, I drove a few miles to visit Dan at the home in neighboring Kensington he has shared for decades with his wife Patricia. My intent was to yack with him for a few hours about our mutual obsession, Vietnam. More than fifty years later, he was still pondering the war as a whole, and I was still trying to understand the My Lai massacre. I arrived at 10 am and we spoke without a break—no water, no coffee, no cookies—until my wife came to fetch me, and to say hello and visit with Dan and Patricia. She left, and I stayed a few more minutes with Dan, who wanted to show me his library of documents that could have gotten him a long prison term. Sometime around 6 pm—it was getting dark—Dan walked me to my car, and we continued to chat about the war and what he knew—oh, the things he knew—until I said I had to go and started the car. He then said, as he always did, “You know I love you, Sy.”

So this is a story about a tutelage that began in the summer of 1972, when Dan and I first connected. I have no memory of who called whom, but I was then at the New York Times and Dan had some inside information on White House horrors he wanted me to chase down—stuff that had not been in the Pentagon Papers. 

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Posted in Government, History, Media, Morality, War

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PATRICK LAWRENCE: What Dan Ellsberg Means

Posted on March 7, 2023 | Leave a comment

Daniel Ellberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, is dying. From Patrick Lawrence at consortiumnews.com:

The term “Fourth Estate” had taken on the dust of a neglected antique before the release of the Pentagon Papers. Afterwards it seemed possible to think again of the press as the independent pole of power required by a working democracy. 

Dan Ellsberg at a press conference in New York City, 1972. (Bernard Gotfryd, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)

I have never met Daniel Ellsberg. A mutual friend, Rob Johnson, the executive director of the Institute of New Economic Thinking, in New York, proposed to introduce us several times but the occasion never presented itself. It does not matter. I know Dan Ellsberg as one knows someone by way of the work he or she has done, and what that work has meant in one’s life.

Another friend, a dear one, wrote a note from Gadsden, Alabama, last Thursday with the subject line, “Ellsberg dying.” This was thoughtful, as this friend unfailingly is, because Twitter has censored my account and I cannot read anything on it unless someone sends an item I am able to open. Ellsberg broke the news first to friends and supporters, among them ConsortiumNews, and then decided to share it on his Twitter account after someone had leaked it. “I’m sorry to report to you that my doctors have given me three to six months to live. Of course, they emphasize that everyone’s case is individual; it might be more, or less.” 

[Related: Daniel Ellsberg’s Not Yet Goodbye]

In the letter, Ellsberg recounts his experiences during and since the Pentagon Papers period — the antiwar work, the work against nuclear weapons:

“When I coped the Pentagon papers in 1969, I had every reason to think I would be spending the rest of my life behind bars. It was a fate I would have gladly accepted if it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam War, unlikely as that seemed (and was). Yet in the end, that action — in ways I could not have foreseen, due to Nixon’s illegal responses — did have an impact on shortening the war.”

And, addressing all of us forthrightly:

“It is long past time—but not too late—for the world’s publics at last to challenge and resist the willed moral blindness of their past and current leaders. I will, as long as I am able, to help in these efforts….”

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, History, Law, Media, Politics, Propaganda

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Chris Hedges: Lynching the Jan. 6 Deplorables

Posted on March 7, 2023 | Leave a comment

Chris Hedges is a rare liberal who realizes principles transcend political affiliation. From Hedges at consortiumnews.com:

The criminal investigation undertaken by the federal government against hundreds of participants in the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol is polarizing the country and shredding civil liberties.

Executing the Law — by Mr. Fish

There is little that unites me with those who occupied the Capitol building on Jan. 6. Their vision for America, Christian nationalism, white supremacy, blind support for Trump and embrace of reactionary fact-free conspiracy theories leaves a very wide chasm between their beliefs and mine.

But that does not mean I support the judicial lynching against many of those who participated in the Jan. 6 events, a lynching that is mandating years in pretrial detention and prison for misdemeanors. Once rights become privileges, none of us are safe. 

The U.S. legal system has a very sordid history. It was used to enforce segregation and legitimize the reign of terror against Black people. It was the hammer that broke the back of militant union movements. It persecuted radicals and reformers in the name of anti-communism.

After 9/11, it relentlessly went after Muslim leaders and activists with Special Administrative Measures (SAMs). SAMs, established by the Clinton administration, originally only applied to people who ordered murders from prison or were convicted of mass murder, but are now used to isolate all manner of detainees before and during trial.

They severely restrict a prisoner’s communication with the outside world; prohibiting calls, letters and visits with anyone except attorneys and sharply limit contact with family members. The solitary confinement like conditions associated with SAMs undermine any meaningful right to a fair trial according to analysis by groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights and can amount to torture according to the United Nations.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, History, Horseshit, Law, Media, Politics, Tyranny

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Dances With Bears – When Military Strategy Revolutionizes Political Strategy on the Ukrainian Battlefield, Inside the NATO Alliance, by John Helmer

Posted on March 6, 2023 | Leave a comment

U.S. neocons are counting on Russia’s oligarchs to overthrow Putin. Good luck with that. From John Helmer at johnhelmer.net:

In the history of the wars of the world, it almost never happens that the military strategy of a fighting state directs and revolutionizes the political strategy, and not the other way round —  as  aspiring politicians, military officers and policemen are taught by the venerable Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz to believe.

But it is happening in Europe now, on the Ukrainian battlefield, and in the war of the US and NATO alliance against Russia.

So long, Sun; so long, Carl; so long, Pardner!

For Russia it would never have turned out this way if President Boris Yeltsin had decided to run for a third term, ruling as medically incapable as President Joseph Biden,  but deferring the succession until after Mikhail Khodorkovsky had sold the Yukos oil company to the US, and the other Russian oligarchs created by Yeltsin had followed suit. Heart, brain, and liver disease stopped the Yeltsin part of that. The Vladimir Putin succession plan then failed to deliver what had been intended.

What has remained of the plan of the destruction of Russia from those days is what there is today.

The oligarchs survive but, according to the terms of the US and NATO sanctions war, they cannot have their assets and freedom of movement back unless they overthrow Putin, change the regime in the Kremlin, and destroy the capability of the Russian military to defend the country.

The defensive strategy in response is obvious. Not only must the capacity of Ukrainian forces and their NATO weapons be destroyed at the front, and their remainder driven to a territorial line west of the Dnieper River, between Kiev and Lvov, out of range of Russian Crimea, Zaphorozhye, Kherson, Donetsk and Lugansk. Also, each of the NATO weapons must be defeated and destroyed which the US sends to the battlefield, and the airborne and ground systems for directing them at their Russian targets neutralized. .

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Posted in Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

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A Massive Global Restructuring is Underway… Here’s What it Means for Europe, by Chris MacIntosh

Posted on March 6, 2023 | Leave a comment

How long before Hungary leaves the EU and NATO? Will any other nation follow? From Chris MacIntosh at internationalman.com:

Massive Global Restructuring

Several shifts in alliances and bifurcations are happening right now which are going under the radar.

Hungary out of the EU?

We’ve long said that Hungary was going to leave the EU. It is just a question of time.

The daily news announced that “hundreds of high-ranking military officers sacked in Hungary”. From the article:

Multiple Hungarian media outlets reported that Hungary’s defense minister sacked hundreds of high-ranking military officers. The people concerned have two months to leave and will get 70 percent of their current salaries as a pension-like allowance even if they continue to work. The minister says the move served the rejuvenation and modernisation of the army. The opposition believes the government fired pro-NATO officers.

To be clear, I don’t know if this is true. But as with most things, you piece together multiple bits of information and a picture forms providing probabilities. It is with these probabilities that we begin to price outcomes and assets accordingly. Where most probable outcomes coincide with cheap or expensive asset classes is where we find asymmetry.

So what we do know is that Hungary has been against the Ukraine war from the get go.

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NBC Reporter Goes to Crimea, Shocks Viewers by Telling The Truth, by Tyler Durden

Posted on March 6, 2023 | 1 comment

Imagine a reporter reporting the news the old-fashioned way: from where it actually happens. From Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge via lewrockwell.com

Mainstream media correspondents for major US networks rarely, if ever, report from inside Crimea and certainly are nowhere near Russian-held territory in eastern Ukraine. However, this week NBC News chief international correspondent Keir Simmons went to Sevastopol, surrounded by a significant Russian military presence given it is home to the Russian Navy’s Black Sea Fleet, and in a live segment admitted that it’s not at all realistic Zelensky and Ukrainian forces can ever hope to take Crimea.

This is especially as the “the people there… view themselves as Russian.” Simmons noted that “This is the closest that any US news crew has got to the Russian Black Sea Fleet in many many years.” He explained that “Vladimir Putin will be determined to defend that port – to not have it take it away from him – he may well do pretty much anything to try to achieve that.”

“It is a very, very dangerous standoff.. it’s hard to see how you reach a negotiation over that. There’s military absolutely everywhere, it is a military town,” he continued, before saying…

“When for example Victoria Nuland talks about that at the very least we [the US] want Crimea to be demilitarized, I find myself standing there and wondering, how on earth does that happen?”

Ukrainian officials and pro-Kyiv media pundits are said to be outraged at the segment, given it repeatedly and bluntly referenced that Crimeans see themselves as Russians. Even a separate write-up filed days earlier from inside Crimea and posted to NBC’s website included the following:

This is not Russia, according to Kyiv, its Western allies and the United Nations. It was annexed by the Kremlin in 2014, with the U.N. calling on Russia to return to its “internationally recognized borders.” And following Moscow’s broader invasion launched a year ago, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has vowed Ukraine will take Crimea back.

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Posted in Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

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Secession Is Inevitable. War to Prevent It Is Optional. By Ryan McMaken

Posted on March 2, 2023 | Leave a comment

Eventually parts of what we know as the United States are going to go their separate ways. Nothing lasts forever. From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:

Never is a very, very long time in politics. Yet whenever the topic of secession or so-called national divorce comes up, how often do we hear that “secession will never happen.” It’s difficult to tell if people using the term “never” actually mean it. If they mean “not in the next ten or twenty years,” that’s plausible. But if they truly mean “not in the next 100 (or more) years,” it’s clear they’re working on the level of absolutely pure, unfounded speculation. Such statements reflect little more than personal hopes and dreams.

Experience is clear that the state of most polities often changes enormously in the span of a few decades. Imagine Russia in 1900 versus Russia in 1920. Or perhaps China in 1930 versus China in 1950. If someone had told the Austrian emperor in 1850 that his empire would be completely dismembered by 1919, he probably would have refused to believe it. Few British subjects in 1945 expected the empire to be all but gone by 1970. In the 1970s, the long-term survival of the Soviet Union appeared to be a fait accompli. For a visual sense of this, simply compare world maps from 1900 and 1950. In less than the span of a human lifetime, the political map of the world often changes so as to be unrecognizable.

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Posted in Governments, History, Politics, Secession

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SCOTT RITTER: Reimagining Arms Control After Ukraine

Posted on March 1, 2023 | 1 comment

It’s hard to imagine reinstating arms control with Russia, when the Russians justifiably believe the U.S. Government wouldn’t observe an agreement to save its life. From Scott Ritter at consortiumnews.com:

Having used arms control to gain unilateral advantage over Russia, the cost to the U.S. and NATO in getting Moscow back to the negotiating table will be high.

Checking out the rise and fall of nuclear warheads over the years of the nuclear arms race at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site in South Dakota, 2017. (Wayne Hsieh, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

U.S.-Russian arms control is in a state of extreme distress.

The U.S. withdrawal from the foundational Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty in 2002 undid the functional and theoretical premise of mutually assured destruction (MAD) that provided logical equilibrium to the fundamentals of nuclear deterrence theory.

Similarly, the Trump administration’s precipitous termination of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty in 2019 attacked both elements of the “trust but verify” maxim that governed issues of compliance verification that made arms control viable in the first place.

The last remaining arms control agreement that places limits on the strategic nuclear arsenals of both the U.S. and Russia is the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START).

Signed in 2010, and extended for five years in 2021, the treaty will expire in 2026. It places restrictions on the number of deployed nuclear warheads each side is permitted to have (1,550), as well as vehicles (missiles, bombers, submarines) to deliver these warheads (700).

Equally important to the numerical caps is the compliance verification regime mandated by the treaty, which includes the right of each side to conduct up to 18 on-site inspections per year. Up to 10 of these inspections can be done at operational bases where nuclear delivery systems are based. Inspectors there can visually confirm the presence of nuclear warheads by randomly selecting missiles for inspection. 

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